The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Russell BakerRead
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the contrast between human struggles in daily life and the extraordinary achievements possible through innovation and resources.
In this quote, Russell Baker humorously reflects on the irony of human capability. While individuals may struggle with mundane tasks and experience personal failures, they can also achieve monumental feats, such as space exploration, with the aid of technology and significant investment. This juxtaposition illustrates the complexities of human nature, where greatness and frailty coexist, suggesting that with the right tools and support, extraordinary accomplishments can become a reality.
Themes
Human CapabilitySpace ExplorationInnovationStruggleAchievement
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a speech on the achievements of humanity in technology and science.
More from Russell Baker
All quotes βVoters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
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When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
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Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
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Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
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Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
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Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.
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Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.
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The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.
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It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.
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The edifice of science not only requires material, but also a plan. Without the material, the plan alone is but a castle in the air-a mere possibility; whilst the material without a plan is but useless matter.
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The day that you stop looking - because you're content God did it - I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.
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